Many residential and commercial buildings have electrical power, lights, doors, gates, shutters, awnings and blind mechanisms that can be operated or programmed using buttons, switches or remote controls. Current methods of wireless control involve handheld devices that typically use sub-1 GHz technologies to send open/close, on/off, or other commands to a receiver integrated into the main mechanism of a device. On receiving a remote control command, the mechanism may, amongst other actions, open or close a door, raise or lower a blind, turn lights on or off, or control the flow of power.
In recent years, the proliferation of smartphones has placed powerful computing devices in the hands of the public. While these devices can generate and transmit wireless control commands, their generic wireless systems are not compatible with the standards currently used in domestic or commercial appliances and mechanisms, so they cannot natively communicate with such in order to execute a command. The ability to deploy a universal communication method is frustrated by the fact that there exist multiple smartphone operating systems that have different communication capabilities, or may be optimized to more efficiently use different communication standards to other operating systems. This makes it difficult to specify a single communication standard suitable for embedding in power, light, door, gate, awning or blind systems that could work ubiquitously with all smartphones across all applications.
Smartphones typically have an operational life of two years while controllable power, light, door, gate, awning and blind mechanisms usually have an operational life greater than ten years. The rapid turnover of smartphones places pressure on manufacturers to continually improve each successive generation. Smartphones therefore tend to integrate the latest communication technology in order to remain competitive. With no unified standard specifying a generic smartphone communication platform, the communication technology one manufacturer chooses may not be adopted by all manufacturers. Alternately, one manufacturer may choose to add restrictions around their communication capabilities that others do not, or may adopt new technology that is not compatible with previous standards.
It can be appreciated that manufacturers of controllable power, light, door, gate, shutter, awning and blind mechanisms may find it highly advantageous for customers to control their products natively from a smartphone. The problem is that integrating the enabling technology has a cost, which increases as more components are required to address the different communication capabilities across different smartphone operating systems and handset configurations in the market. This is compounded by the fact that the long operational life of power, light, door, gate, awning and blind mechanisms results in a high probability that any embedded communication standard may become obsolete before the end of the operational life of the mechanism.